It’s a question Edmonton-based game developer Bruce McLavy has been struggling with for over a month.

A month ago, McLavy – formerly of Bioware – created a Kickstarter campaign for his new game Northern Guard: Assault. Featuring Canadian locations, heroes and sensibilities, the game has all the heralds of what makes a great mobile experience. But it’s decidedly and proudly Canadian, which is the problem.

“It’s fairly rare to see a ‘Canadian’ game and it’s even rarer to see a Canadian game with a mainstream gameplay mechanic,” McLavy said during an interview over Skype.

“There’s concern over alienating a huge part of their audience, and that’s the challenge I’m dealing with,” he said. “I’ve even had developers helping me and one left saying, ‘I really like the game idea, but I can’t see you pulling off this ‘Canadian’ thing.”

Northern Guard: Assault is a mobile game on iOS, Windows, and Android devices. A hybrid of tower-defense and real-time strategy, the game’s enemies assault the structures you are tasked with guarding, but the game has a Canadian twist.

Avatar is one of the many heroes available in the game, and each feature Canadian identities from their cultures to political leanings.

As part of the Prime Minister of Canada’s government-mandated super hero team, you travel across the country through a branching narrative that reaches from Parliament Hill to Chalk River, ON.

The characters are also meant to examine the different racial and political subsets that make up the country. However, a Canada-heavy narrative proved hard to sell.

“It becomes easier to even to create a whole new fictional world as opposed to saying it’s based in Canada,” McLavy said.

Ten years ago, McLavy worked in graphic design in Winnipeg. During the last NHL strike, the sports store that employed him went under and he had to look elsewhere.

Looking outside the realms of web or graphic design, he had to look into his passions and after an educational stint at Simon Fraser, he went to Bioware to work in mastering.

While he was there, he helped out on distribution systems leading to him to join the Mass Effect 3 team.

The destruction of Vancouver at the hands of the Reapers as seen in Mass Effect 3.

After working at the Edmonton-based studio, McLavy decided to open his own studio called FutureArts Inc.

“Bioware is a great place and they are extremely passionate,” McLavy said. “I wanted to apply the same passion they have there to something I believe in and that’s where the Canadian aspect is so important to this project.”

Now in its last days, McLavy’s Kickstarter campaign has reached about 10 per cent of its funding goal. He says the experience with the crowd-funding website has taught him a lot, but has left him with even more questions about the Canadian video game identity.

“There was one American who gave me some feed back and said if I made some small changes he’d back it. I made some small changes, I changed my video, and made some updates, and he came back said, ‘I liked your changes so much so, I actually backed your project and went for the T-Shirt tier.’”

“But I don’t think I’d wear anything that said ‘Canada’ on it, but then he followed up saying if it didn’t work out to tell him I was going to get rid of that ‘Canada’ thing and do a more mainstream game.”

There are examples of game set in Canada that have excelled. Deus Ex: Human Revolution, for example, spends a large part of its game in Montreal, but the game’s protagonist Adam Jensen finds himself frequenting cities South of the border more often.

For some game developers, there might be a bit of shyness when it comes to setting a game in a Canadian city.

McLavy points to shows like the CBC’s Republic of Doyle or Flash Point that have a distinctly American presentation, but when you look a bit deeper its distinctly Canadian as examples of how Canadian developers could use Canada in their games.

“You realize it almost immediately after watching it,” McLavy said. “I want to take being Canadian to video games.”

“And in terms of Northern Guard, I want to pull it to the fore,” he said.